Leisha The story behind this weekend’s Ripening & Renewal Gratitude Meal and how it becomes a meal for the mind.
We usually think of eating as something that happens in the mouth and the stomach. Long before food reaches the stomach, though, the brain is already at work. It reads the smell, the colour, the sound of the crunch, the temperature and the texture, and it compares all of it with everything you have eaten before. Every time we eat, the brain is putting together sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami, aroma, temperature, texture, crunch and memory.
Most people have never heard of the part of the brain where much of this comes together. It is called the insula, and I think everyone who cooks should know about it.
The hidden island
Deep inside each side of the brain, roughly behind your temples, there is a fold called the insula. The name is Latin for island. That is a perfect name. It sits tucked under the folds of brain mass around it,
This is where taste becomes something you know. When you bite into a lemon, the receptors on your tongue send a signal to the brainstem. From there it passes through the thalamus, which works like a relay station, and arrives at the insula. Only then does your mind say “sour”.
I love that every taste I have ever enjoyed first came alive in a part of me no one can see. It fits with almost everything we do in this kitchen, where most of the work happens out of sight.
The insula does much more than taste. It is also where the brain listens to the inside of the body. Brain scans show it becoming more active when people notice their own thirst, heartbeat or a full stomach. Hunger, fullness, a settled or unsettled gut, all of it is registered here. It is also closely wired to the parts of the brain that handle emotion.
So a taste never arrives on its own. By the time you know the lemon is sour, your brain has already mixed that sourness with how your body feels and what it has learned to expect. That is why the same soup can be a comfort one evening and too much the next.
Smell adds the memory. Most of what we call flavour is really aroma, rising up the back of the throat to the nose. Pinch your nose while you eat and a good meal goes surprisingly flat. Smell also has an unusually short road into the brain. The olfactory bulb, where smell is first processed, has direct connections to the amygdala and the hippocampus, the centres for emotion and memory. Many of the memories smell brings back come from childhood, when we first met most smells.
This is how a spoonful of something can take you back to a kitchen you have not stood in for thirty years. I hope something on your plate does that for you this weekend.
Tasting is already digesting
The brain does not wait for food to reach the stomach. The sight, smell and taste of food, even just thinking about it, start what physiologists call the cephalic phase of digestion. Saliva starts to flow and the stomach begins releasing its juices before you have swallowed anything. Cephalic means “of the head.” Digestion begins in the brain.
This is one of the reasons I ask people to slow down at our table. A meal eaten in a rush, half noticed, gives the body very little warning. A meal you look at, smell and taste properly gives your whole digestive system time to get ready. Bitter greens are especially good at starting this, which is why so many food traditions begin a meal with something bitter.
Food as medicine: our Mind Ripening & Renewal meal
Every weekend we hold a gratitude meal, and each one has its own name. This weekend’s is Ripening & Renewal, A Gratitude Mind Meal, and it is our way of putting all of this on a plate. Food as medicine is not only about what a food contains. It is also about how we taste it, and what the brain and body do with it once we have.
Our prep for every weekend meal starts on Monday, and this week’s started today. We begin early because the ferments need the time. We make our own sprouts and bread, culture our own Greek yoghurt, and use eggs from our own hens. The salads are picked from the garden the day you eat them, and we make all our own dressings.
Your brain is only about 2% of your body weight, but it can use around 20% of your energy. It is a hungry organ, and it is built and run from what we eat. Each dish this weekend was chosen for what it gives your senses, and several for what they give your brain.
Pear & Brie Nachos with Hot Honey & Walnut Crunch. This is the first “mind bite,” and it has a little of everything: sweet pear, salty creamy Brie, bitter walnut, warmth from the honey and plenty of crunch. Smell it before you taste it and notice how much of the flavour is really aroma. Walnuts are also the only nut with a significant amount of ALA, a plant omega-3, and people who eat walnuts tend to score better on thinking tests. Those studies show a link rather than proof, but I am happy to put walnuts first.
Slow-Braised Beef with Caramelized Onion & Rosemary Gravy. This is the deep, savoury centre of the meal. Umami is the taste the tongue uses to recognise protein, and slow braising, browning the meat and caramelizing the onions all build it up. The rosemary carries it into the nose.
Roasted Zapallo with Garlic, Rosemary & Toasted Pumpkin Seeds. Roasting draws the zapallo’s natural sugars to the surface and caramelizes the edges, so it tastes sweeter than it ever did raw. The toasted seeds bring the crunch, and pumpkin seeds are a good source of magnesium and zinc.
Green Cucumber, Celery & Apple Crunch. Cold, crisp, tart and fragrant with fresh dill. This dish is as much about sound as taste. In a study at Oxford, potato chips seemed crisper and fresher when the sound of each bite was made louder, and the people tasting them did not realise the sound was changing their judgement. Listen to this one as you eat it.
Living Herb & Sprout Garden Salad. Fresh herbs, garden leaves and living sprouts, picked the day you eat them. The bitterness wakes up digestion, and the greens are good for the brain too. In one study of 960 older adults followed for about five years, those who ate about 1.3 servings of greens a day declined at roughly half the rate of those who ate almost none. A sprout is a seed that has just woken up, about as fresh and new as food gets.
Herbed Devilled Egg. Eggs from our own hens, with our cultured Greek yoghurt, lemon, mustard and garden herbs. An egg yolk is one of the best everyday sources of choline, about 147 mg in one large egg. The body uses choline to make acetylcholine, a messenger the brain relies on for memory and mood, and higher choline intake has been linked to better verbal and visual memory.
Celery & Lemon Ferment. Our living sour element, and the reason prep starts on Monday. The microbes need the week to transform it. In a 10-week study at Stanford, people who ate more fermented foods had a more diverse gut community and lower levels of 19 inflammatory proteins in their blood. The gut and the brain talk to each other all day long, and these little cooks are part of that conversation.
Clove Elixir with Quitig. Aromatic and warming, and made to be smelled as much as tasted. Clove’s scent comes mostly from a compound called eugenol, and it is one of those smells that seems to carry a memory with it. Breathe it in before the first sip and see where it takes you.
After the meal
Some of the best things for the brain happen once the plates are cleared. A walk is one of them. So, please take a walk in the garden. In a one-year study of 120 older adults, those who walked for 40 minutes three days a week grew their hippocampus by about 2%, while the group who only stretched lost a little over 1%. The hippocampus is the brain’s memory centre.
Sleep is the other. In mice, the spaces between brain cells widen by about 60% during sleep, so fluid can wash waste away faster, including a protein linked to Alzheimer’s disease. The brain seems to do its cleaning at night. A good meal, a slow walk and an early night is not a bad prescription.
At the table
When you sit down this weekend or to any meal, try this with your first mouthful.
- Look at it and smell it before you eat. Notice if your mouth starts to water. That is the cephalic phase beginning.
- Take a small taste with your nose pinched, and notice how little you can name.
- Let go of your nose and feel the flavour come back as the aroma reaches you.
- Notice how your body answers. Does it warm, settle or brighten? That is your insula at work.
- Ask yourself what it reminds you of, and let a memory come if one wants to.
A gratitude meal at Living Ground seems like the right place for this. Before anything reaches the table, a lot of lives have worked on it: the soil, the hens, the microbes in the jars, the hands in the kitchen. Tasting slowly is one way of saying thank you to all of them. And while you do it, your brain is doing what we try to do in this kitchen every week, taking something too small to see and turning it into something you can feel.
Ripening & Renewal is served on Saturday and Sunday, $13. Taste slowly. Notice sweet, sour, bitter, salty and savoury. Notice aroma, temperature and texture. Notice which bite brings a memory.
